An ontology-driven process modeling framework

Abstract

Designing, analyzing and managing complex processes are recently become crucial issues in most application contexts, such as e-commerce, business process (re-)engineering, Web/grid computing. In this paper, we propose a framework that supports the designer in the definition and in the analysis of complex processes by means of several facilities for reusing, customizing and generalizing existent process components. To this aim we tightly integrate process models with a domain ontology and an activity ontology, so providing a semantic vision of the application context and of the processes themselves. Moreover, the framework is equipped with a set of techniques providing for advanced functionalities, which can be very useful when building and analyzing process models, such as consistency checking, interactive ontology navigation, automatic (re)discovering of process models. A software architecture fully supporting our framework is also presented and discussed. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.